From Holly Shen Chaves’ review for Hyperallergic:
In addition to supplying critics with fodder for the talent-scout game, MFA shows can also be useful barometers of change, signaling new approaches to a familiar medium. So the fact that four out of six graduates from the Photography MFA program at RISD incorporated a variety of media like sculpture, video, artist books, and performance art in their thesis exhibition says a lot about the mercurial role of photography in contemporary art.
On view at ClampArt is work by Scott Alario, Sophie Barbasch, Kevin Barton, Rob MacInnis, Keith Yahrling, and Ji Yeo, who are part of a growing trend of artists approaching photography as a component of a larger process. Photographs return as a documentary tool for parsing new lines of inquiry, as they mine collections or archives of information to uncover questions about identity, gender, and personal narrative. These graduates have more in common with late 1960s conceptualists and less with artists like Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, or Andreas Gursky who popularized the oversized approach to photography in the 1990s.